In the fifth edition of “Conversations with Comms Leaders,” Michael Scheuer, SVP Corporate Communications at the Freudenberg Group, discusses trust as the most important currency in a communications landscape shaped by AI, the rise of AI assistants as a new force in reputation management, the shift towards smaller communications teams with greater strategic influence, and the importance of global real time data for rapid decision making.
1. What was your personal PR highlight of 2026?
2. What might surprise comms leaders in the next two years?
3. What is something you believe about AI in the communications industry that some communication professionals probably would disagree with?
4. What is the biggest benefit of using the Meltwater platform for your team?
1. What was your personal PR highlight of 2026?
My highlight was not a specific project, but a realisation: Trust is once again the most important factor in communications. In 2026, almost anyone could suddenly use AI to produce an unlimited volume of content. As a result, credibility became the truly scarce resource. Organisations that communicated through authentic stories, genuine experts, and a clear point of view achieved far greater impact than those that simply produced more content. Communications is no longer about production. It is about trust.
2. What might surprise comms leaders in the next two years?
The speed at which traditional search engines will lose relevance and be replaced by AI assistants. Until now, we have created content for two audiences: people and search engines. In the future, there will be a third audience: AI systems themselves. The key question will no longer be whether we appear on the first page of Google, but whether an AI assistant identifies our company as a relevant source at all. This will fundamentally change our work. Reputation will no longer be shaped solely by the media. It will increasingly be shaped by the training data and knowledge environments used by these assistants.
3. What is something you believe about AI in the communications industry that some communication professionals probably would disagree with?
I believe that communications departments will become smaller, but significantly more influential. Those who use AI effectively will spend less time on production and have more time for their core leadership responsibilities: providing context and direction. AI will simply perform many tasks better than we can. Press releases, monitoring reports, translations, summaries, and speech drafts will increasingly be produced automatically.
At the same time, AI makes effective communications more important, not less important. Strategy, sound judgement, crisis awareness, cultural understanding, and the ability to build trust cannot be automated. In the future, our value will therefore be measured less by our output and more by the quality of our judgement.
4. What is the biggest benefit of using the Meltwater platform for your team?
For us, the greatest benefit is not monitoring itself, but the speed at which information can be turned into decisions. We have global media monitoring, social listening, alerts, and reporting within a single system.
The international perspective is particularly valuable to us. For a global company such as Freudenberg, it is no longer sufficient to focus solely on the German media landscape. We need to understand how topics are being discussed in North America, China, Europe, and Latin America, as close to real time as possible.
About Michael Scheuer
Michael Scheuer is SVP Corporate Communications at the Freudenberg Group. Born in Frankfurt, he began his career by completing vocational training in banking at Commerzbank. He subsequently studied communications, political science, sociology, and media law at the University of Munich. Rather than pursuing a traditional career in journalism, he chose corporate communications and gained experience in Germany and internationally at Siemens before joining Freudenberg in 2012. Today, he is responsible for the company’s global communications.
